Research is a very important task that is often honed-in on a lot in English classes, but it is a vital thing to understand for almost every discipline of study out there. Beyond the classroom though, even us writers and authors need to do a lot of research when we’re writing a book. A lot of my books talk about psychology, religions, and war, so I’ve had to research a lot of things in the past. Today, I’ll be teaching you how you can also conduct research for your next book and make sure that you’re being true to what your goals are.
(affiliate disclaimer: some of the links in this article are affiliate links, which means that I make a small commission at no extra cost to you).
Understand the Your Story’s Research Requirements
Before you even get started on the research aspect, it’s important to understand what sort of requirements your story has for research in the first place. If you’re writing a story about something that you’re personal very familiar with, you may only need to do a bit of research to confirm certain elements, but you may need to do a lot of research if you’re not as familiar with a subject.
The genre of your book is an important factor in determining how much research you’ll need to do. If you’re writing historical fiction, you’ll probably need to do a good amount of research on the historical time periods you’re going to be exploring. If you’re creating a fantasy story, you may need to do research on cultures or myths for inspiration.
The setting of your book may also require you to do research. For instance, if you’ve lived in Ohio your whole life but you want to write a story that takes place in France, you’ll need to research France and how life is like there.
Identify the elements you’re not sure about and list them down to research more on.
Start Out With Broad Research
Depending on your genre of choice, you’ll want to begin using whatever resources you can initially find. This is pretty much a surface-level type of research, and this may be enough–unless you’re writing nonfiction, then you need to dig deeper, but I’ll get into that later.
For my series, The Fallen Age Saga, I had to look into a lot of things such as the U.S. Military and its branches, political structures, real-world religions, mythology, psychology and more. It really pays off once you understand everything because it makes the writing process easier.
The Internet
You’ll probably start by looking up your topic of choice on a plain search engine like Google. This will lead to a lot of websites like Wikipedia, which you can use for some basic research. If you want to go a bit further or you feel like Wikipedia just doesn’t have enough info, you can dig deeper by using links in the Wikipedia page or by just going back to the main results page and clicking on the different links to find more information.
Books and Academic Journals
There are plenty of places you can find deeper information than just the internet, especially if your topic is a bit more niche. You can use books and academic journals like JSTOR to find more information, but you’ll probably be fine with just a quick search online. JSTOR and other academic databases are really good for people writing nonfiction or research pieces, but they are expensive if you’re not using a subscription provided by your university/college.
Documentaries and Videos
You can find lots of information through documentaries on places like YouTube and even on stuff like Netflix. For example, if I was doing research on organized crime, I could use a channel like The NSTLKIA Channel, which covers lots of different organized crime groups in extensive depth.
I think that videos are sometimes more digestible than books or articles and can make conducting research for your book a bit easier, as they’ve already done a lot of research themselves in these videos.
Start Diving Deep Into Subjects
After you’ve gotten a general understanding of what your subject(s) are, then you can either stop there or move on depending on the requirements of your story/project. If you’re writing something that requires a lot of intense understanding of the time period, such as a story set in World War II, then you should probably go deeper than just page one of Google. So, let’s get into some research terminology.
Primary Sources
Primary sources provide first-hand accounts and data. They usually come from people who were directly involved in the event, time period, situation, etc… Primary sources are extremely important as they provide a realistic glimpse from the eyes of someone alive in those times.
Primary sources include things like diary entries, artifacts, historical documents, eye-witness accounts, etc…
Secondary Sources
Secondary sources take primary sources and analyze and interpret them. Secondary sources often take primary sources and contextualize them in some sort of informational piece and offer different perspectives on history.
Secondary sources include biographies, academic papers, and books written by someone not involved in the situation. Newspapers are also secondary sources if the article was written by a journalist not attached to the event or story.
Use Technology to Your Advantage
I always advocate for using technology to make our lives easier as writers, and I’ve talked about different tools for writers to write their books and organize their world building, but I’ll also talk about ways you can use technology to get your research done faster.
Online Libraries Are Helpful
If you aren’t sure where to find resources easily, then you can try and use online archives and online libraries such as Internet Archive, Project Gutenberg, and other resources that include tons of eBooks, newspapers, articles, etc… to help you with finding the necessary research tools.
Research Organization to Stay On Top of Things
Organizing your research can be a complicated task, especially if you find a lot of resources. I recommend you look into using something like Scrivener, which helps you manage research materials, your drafts, your notes and more. If you want to learn more about Scrivener, you can check out this article to see my review of it.
If Possible, Conduct Field Research
Now, if you have the luxury of being able to live near historical sites or you can easily travel to them, then field research might actually be something you can conduct. You can do things like visit those historical sites and note what you see, try to capture the feeling of being there, and so on.
You can also visit museums in any city near you to get an idea of what sort of history they talk about. I recently was able to go to a museum that had an entire extensive exhibit on Ancient Egypt and it was a really informative visit that helped me with researching for my own stories.
You can also try and get hands-on experience with things that you talk about in your story. Maybe a character is an archer and you want to understand archery from your own lens. You can sign up for a class on archery and try to know how it feels like to actually use a bow and arrow. I personally used to be in an archery club at my school, so that’s how I got my own experience and can write about it pretty naturally in my stories.
Use Many Sources to Verify Information
If you’re writing a book where historical accuracy is important, then it’s very important to verify the things you’re writing about and the research you’ve done. That’s why you need to use multiple sources to confirm and cross-reference your facts.
There is also the presence of bias in many secondary sources, so you’ll need to take from many sources of all sorts of perspectives, as you may be portraying a historical event from a skewed lens.
Again, this all really depends on what your genre is going to be, but the more in-depth you need to be, the more in-depth your research has to be. It’s a very linear relationship, in my opinion.
Keep Track of Sources
If you need to cite your sources for your book or paper, then you’ll 100% need to keep track of any source you’ve used. If you’re writing fiction, nobody cares, but nonfiction papers and books must have resources listed at the end.
You can use tools like Zotero or Citation Machine to get your sources cited and organized in one place. You should also be keeping track of your sources that you find as you go, so having a bibliography is helpful.
Research is something that I consider to be a very important piece of the writing process. When I was writing Soldat, I had to do a lot of research on the military and how it works. I did go off and write my own thing, but I used the real-world to help me contextualize how things work in the military and what it’s like to be a soldier. I watched videos, read first-hand accounts, and used articles as my sources, but I would note the way people spoke, reacted, and operated in the sources I used. It’s important, especially if you have no experience with the subject at hand. I personally have no connection to the military, so I didn’t want to sound like I had no idea what I was talking about–people will notice!
Before you head on out, check out my series, The Fallen Age Saga and don’t forget to sign up for my newsletter to get updates on all my WIPs, books, posts and more!